1. Technical Field
The claimed subject matter relates generally to control of digital content and, more specifically, to techniques for ensuring quality of experience (QoE) related to digital content via trusted components as determined by a content or service provider.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computers have become increasingly connected via networks and the Internet, the amount of content has grown in proportion to the size of the communication channels, or the bandwidth. Once used primarily for electronic mail, or email, and small file transfers, networks such as networks in general and the Internet specifically are increasingly relied upon by content providers to distribute high quality content such as movies and music recordings.
Content providers that distribute such high quality content face correspondingly increased production costs. To control security and restrict access to material, content is sometimes protected by encryption, digital rights management (DRM) systems or conditional access (CA) systems. These techniques act as “gates” to the information. However, once material is inside the gate, i.e. the receiving system has been granted control, the presentation of the content or material is unprotected, and users have virtually free reign. In other words, the material may be handled or presented by any component within the receiving system, i.e. no further control is considered. One example of this approach is Blu-Ray®, a system published by the Blu-ray Disk Association (BDA). The BDA standard includes a content protection system that grants permission at a device/hardware/system level, and not to individual software components that handle the content once authorization of device/hardware/system has been granted. Specifically, a particular device, identified by a licensed device identifier, is approved or prohibited from rendering content that is protected using a set of licensed device keys. The content is protected with a simple key that can be derived from components included with the content by any authorized (non-revoked) device using the simple key. Once an authorized device has unlocked the content with the key, the device and the system components have complete access to the content without further restriction, i.e. no further authorization or authentication is required. This means that in the BDA system. QoE, or trust in system components is never considered once a Blue-Ray® player has been authorized to decrypt and render the content. For example, the content may be played from any storage device, using any decoder, any video driver and even outputted or routed to another device for playback. In addition, authorization cannot be granted or denied based upon whether or not a component or chain of components meet criteria that specify, for example, particular brands, models, performance characteristics or quality.